ABEL POSSE’S DAIMÓN AND THE ETERNAL RETURN

Lope de Aguirre (1515?–1561) is the protagonist of several novels and films that deal with the conquistador’s brief career on the historical stage. Some works, such as Miguel Otero Silva’s Lope de Aguirre, Príncipe de la libertad (1962), have depicted Aguirre as a paladin of Latin American independence and others, such as Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), portray the rebel from Oñate as a proto-fascist madman.^[1]Abel Posse’s Daimón (1978) is critical of the insanely exaggerated individualism of the conquistador loco. However, Posse’s version of Aguirre is also a reopening of the past that challenges totalizing systems of historical narrative.^[2] Using the myth of the Eternal Return, Abel Posse’s Menippean satire^[3] suggests that Contextualist emplotments are preferable to Organicist or Mechanistic arrangements of historical narratives and affirms that the true time of the Eternal Return is writing itself.

In Daimón conquistador and rebel Lope de Aguirre, the historical protagonist of the Crónicas de Omagua y El Dorado,^[4] reverses the journey of the narrator of Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (1953). Instead of going back through time in search of a past he cannot know, Posse’s Aguirre moves forward into a future he could not know. He is resurrected from the dead and, dressed in the same tattered uniform he wore when he was executed by his own troops in 1561, he wanders the Americas with his verdugos and víctimas through over four centuries of Latin American history. Resuming the conquest and his personal rebellion against the King of Spain, Posse’s Aguirre seeks to enact his own version of the Eternal Return by repeating “todos los crímenes y todos los sufrimientos . . .” (29).

The myth of the Eternal Return is probably the oldest known response to the “Terror of History.” In Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return Mircea Eliade writes that since archaic times people have attempted to protect themselves against the perceived chaos of changing circumstances by ritually “abolishing” change through periodic reenactments of the creation of the cosmos or of the cultural founders’ heroic deeds. The myth and ritual of the Eternal Return gives historical events a meaning that is comforting and coherent, “capable of being fitted into a well-consolidated system, in which the cosmos and man’s existence had each its raison d’être” (142). Organicist and Mechanistic historicism are the modern equivalent of this ancient attitude. These discursive arguments of historical events reflect the belief that, much as the archaic ritual of the Eternal Return reconstructs its cosmologies, history must be shaped by a constant and coherent plot.

According to Hayden White’s definitions from his Metahistory,^[5] practitioners of Organicist historicism take a collection of seemingly diffuse phenomena and construct narratives in order to represent the “consolidation or crystallization” of some “integrated entity” that becomes more important than any of the “individual entities” that are defined or examined in the narrative flow.^[6] History written in the Organicist mode “tends to be oriented toward the determination of the end or goal toward which all the processes found in the historical field are presumed to be tending” (16). Nationalist historians, most notably those who are precursors of or adherents to the various fascisms of the twentieth century, approach history from an Organicist perspective and believe that such factors as “blood and soil” or “national spirit” prefigure a nation’s destiny.

Mechanistic plot configurations also attempt an Organicist synthesis, but they tend to be more reductive. Perhaps the best known example of Mechanistic historicism is Marxist dialectical materialism. Mechanistic historicism claims that historical events, like Newtonian physics, are governed by certain “laws” and are bound to culminate in certain, predictable results. A Mechanist generally approaches the historical field with a determinist thesis and investigates the past in order to apprehend the rules that putatively control the operations of history. The Mechanist then proceeds to compose historical narratives in order to present the outcomes of those principles.^[7]Organicist and Mechanist historicism tend to be championed by thinkers from nations that have not experienced extended periods of historical terror or are advocated by individuals from the victimized nations who have benefited or hope to benefit from Organicist and Mechanist constructions. Those who happen to be in the pathway of violently expanding empires will naturally tend to resist, if not totally reject, the notion that the suffering and annihilation they have endured can somehow be justified and tolerated by the exigencies of the “World Spirit” or the explanations of “historical necessity.”^[8]

In Posse’s novel the misadventures of Lope de Aguirre suggest that a Contextualist understanding and ordering of history is a preferable alternative for a Latin America that has experienced the consequences of Organicist and Mechanist historicism from Columbus to Castro. Unlike Organicist and Mechanist models, Conceptualist historical narratives do not claim to be guided by universal laws of cause and effect nor do they seek to elucidate general teleological principles of historical development.^[9] Rather, their narratives are much more circumscribed in their characterizations of historical events and are contingent in both tone and intent. The Contextualist thinks in terms of changing trends as opposed to immutable forces and iron-clad laws. Contextualist narratives “are constructed as actual relationships that are presumed to have existed at specific times and places, the first, final and material causes of which can never be known” (White 18).

In Daimón the protagonist’s journey through history parallels the experience of Melquíades’s room in Cien años de soledad, where it is always Monday and March for some characters, whereas for others it is a space that underscores the passage of time, the decay of the past, and, above all, a constantly changing context. For Posse’s Aguirre it is always the moment of the “etapa militar, la conquista” (39), while for the other characters in Daimón, even his fellow marañones, history moves forward to new moments. After they are abandoned by their master, Aguirre’s original cohorts (and their victims) enter the flow of historical events. They become participants in the societies of the newly independent republics and, while they retain a certain archetypal quality as well as a recognizable identity, they move with the times and restructure their world view in accordance of changing conditions.^[10] The “eterno alzamento de América” (84), namely Aguirre’s own project to establish the Emperio Marañón, happens to be structured along the lines of a world view frozen somewhere between that of a Medieval crusader or champion of the Reconquista and Machiavelli’s Renaissance prince. As time passes, Aguirre fades from the collective memory while locked into an outmoded mind-set, following the imperatives of his “manifest destiny” and refusing to fully consider the changed and changing situations: “Lope, poco observador de los cambios, insistía en las jerarquías del pasado como suele ocurrir en una reunión de ex alumnos o de gente de tropa” (144). During the narration of the centuries of his return Aguirre makes no impact on the course of historical events. He plays the role of a bewildered, frustrated, and resentful observer, still the same man of the sixteenth-century chronicles, mentally isolated on the margins of a world in a perpetual state of transition.^[11]

As Posse’s Aguirre encounters the “facts” of Latin America’s history, the novel continually returns to the theme of the conquistador’s resistance to living for a present context.Daimón’s protagonist repeats the experience of the first conquistadors who: “Cuando por fin se los veía quietos era porque hablaban del futuro, haciendo febriles planes que les hacían sentir el presente como mera pérdida de tiempo” (44). In the conqueror’s mind the logic of self gratification is sacrificed to the nebulous, abstract imperative of some unknown and undefined telos. This is the same sort of metaphysics encountered in the beginning of América’s written history that chronicled the mentality of the conquistadors who “organizaban sus delirantes visiones del tiempo bajo el nombre Historia (una especie de metafísica pista de carreras)” (27). Aguirre’s futility becomes increasingly more evident as his avatar moves through time. After centuries of failures and misfortunes during his “second coming,” Aguirre eventually realizes that there is something radically wrong with this world view. However, rather than modifying his understanding of history or opting for something like a Contextualist structuring of his historical narrative, he attempts to escape from history all together. Under the direction of his indigenous “guru,” Huamán and with the aid of generous doses of the hallucinogen ayawaska, Aguirre tries to deshistorizarse. During these sessions of transcultural psychotherapy Aguirre begins to see the incoherence of his attempt to impose his own rigid historical vision on the flow of life. Huamán counsels the protagonist against the error of turning facts into essences and the self-fulfilling tyranny of radically integrative historicism. The conquistador momentarily discovers the fatal flaw of his conquistador mentality “una secreta coherencia (por supuesto que no se trata de la solemne Historia . . .) puede ser entrevista siempre que no se pretenda ingenuamente aferrarla con la red de humo de las razones humanas (¡minirracionalidad!)” (129). Nevertheless, Huamán’s “therapy” does not take hold. Aguirre cannot escape from history altogether, nor can he free himself from the mania of his fossilized world view. The all-too-human conquistador fails to transcend the limitations of his self-imposed historicist certainty. He remains the eternal Sixteenth-Century Rebel, the frustrated founder of the illusory Imperio Marañón, until he is banished from the pages of the novel.

After “eliminating” the protagonist, Posse closes Aguirre’s vicious circle and sets it in motion again by allowing the conquistador’s diabolical alter ego, his daimón, to survive as “it” is venereally transferred through his lover, La Mora to liberation theologist-revolutionary Diego Torres, “el creador de la nueva verdad obligatoria” (222). However, Torres’s truth is hardly new. Its latest portavoz, regardless of intention or ideology, will follow the same eternal return of the play for power—guided by an Organicist or a Mechanist world hypothesis. The apparent pessimism of the return and survival of Aguirre’s daimón reflects the dangers of the dead hand of determinist historicism—be it “reactionary” or “progressive.” As Daimón mythologizies history and historicizes myth, the novel parodies the sort of thinking that petrifies the past, paralyzes the present, and undermines possibility that history can be of any use to the development of a better, or at least significantly more open-minded future. This is Daimón’s Menippean satire of the epic tone of Organicist and Mechanist historicism that claims to fully comprehend the human experience. Aguirre’s anachronistic and tragicomic adventures place him in a constant confrontation with a new and open-ended contexts that recall our inability to know and encompass our fate.^[12] The perils of Posse’s protagonist also remind us that myth and history are not the same thing and we make a great mistake when we attempt to impose the circular certainty of the former on the linear unpredictability of the latter.

Aguirre’s story highlights the futility of systems that fail to consider the role of chance or of the changing play of economic, scientific, and political forces in the emplotment of a particular historical context. The tyrant’s adventures also underscore the absurdity of taking the metaphor of the Eternal Return literally.In his article “Cien años de soledad: The Novel as Myth and Archive” Roberto González Echevarría addresses the question of how myth and history can co-exist in the novel. He works with the idea of the archive, a process of textual production that is something like a virtual library where texts are retrieved, reshuffled, and recombined. This “accumulation of texts that is no mere heap, but an arché, a relentless memory that disassembles the fictions of myth, literature and even history” (373). In the archive it is not the order of chronology that prevails, but rather the rules of writing. The “voided presences” of the sixteenth-century crónicas and other archival texts such as González Echevarría’s example of the rotting Spanish galleon in Cien años de soledad or Abel Posse’s Emperador en harapos “retain their archival quality, their power to differentiate, to space” (374–75).

By making use of the archive, new narratives not only create texts, they also expose the underlying codes of past dogma. Following the metaphysics of the Eternal Return—conserving a finite number of states of universal energy that are infinite in duration—Daimón also reaffirms the constant improvisation of writing while it rejects both the mythical value of origins and the eschatological search for a telos. History in general and Aguirre’s story in particular have neither beginning nor end, rather they are constantly rewritten. In Daimón the Eternal Return is ultimately not a cosmology or a metaphysics but rather a theory of the production of textual meaning. Posse’s portrayal of the mad conqueror is a return to the scene of the crimes through writing.^[13]In Daimón it is the trace remembrance of past crimes, and the mythical reiteration conquistador’s impulse, not the memory of the tyrant as individual subject, that reappears. The conquistador will continue to return in new incarnations and different textual configurations—obeying the laws of an eternal metempsy-chosis—that is to say the time of writing within the space of the archive.

Finally, Daimón returns to the stacks of Borges’s Babylonian library.^[14] This is the Eternal Return of the literary archive, the universal compendium of texts to be rewritten and reread as long as there are writers who will write and readers who will read what has been written and what will be rewritten, now and in the future. The use of the Eternal Return in Daimón is not a rejection of history, rather it questions the inflexible constructions of Organicist and Mechanist historical narratives. Posse’s novel also reminds us that historical memory must find meaning in every context through the eternal return to an archive that produces meaningful texts for each new generation.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Balderston, Daniel, ed. The Historical Novel in Latin America. Tulane: Hispamérica, 1986.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Step Not Beyond. Trans. and Introd. Lycette Nelson. Albany: State U of New York P, 1992.

Carpentier, Alejo. Los pasos perdidos. 1959. México: Compañía General de Ediciones, 1973.

Eliade, Mircea. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. New York: Harper, 1959.

García Márquez. Cien años de soledad. 1967. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1990.

González Echevarría, Roberto. “Cien años de soledad: The Novel as Myth and Archive.” Modern Language Notes 99 (March 1984): 358–80.

Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Trans. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper, 1984.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Mathieu, Corina S. “Daimón o la génesis de la identidad americana.” Romance Languages Annual 1991. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue Research Foundation, 1992. 514–17.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989.

___. The Use and Abuse of History. Trans. Adrian Collins. New York: Bobs-Merrill, 1957.

___. Thus Spake Zarathustra. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954.

Posse, Abel. Daimón. 1978. Barcelona: Plaza Janés, 1989.

Sklodowska, Elzbieta. “El (re)descubrimiento de América: la parodia en la novela histórica.” Romance Quarterly 37.3 (1990): 345–52.

White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.

^[1]Other works of fiction and film that deal with the career of Lope de Aguirre are Arturo Uslar-Pietri’s El camino de El Dorado (1947), Ramón Sender’s La aventura equinocial de Lope de Aguirre (1962), and Carlos Saura’s film El Dorado (1988).

^[2]This is consistent with what Linda Hutcheon calls postmodern historiographic metafiction: “This is the context in which the postmodern historical sense situates itself: outside associations of Enlightenment progress or development, idealist Hegelean world historical process, or essentialized Marxist notions of history” (92).

^[3]Daimón is clearly an example of Menippean Satire. The novel contains the following Mennipean elements: The use of the fantastic (Aguirre’s resurrection), journeys to imaginary or mythical lands (Aguirre’s journeys to the land of the Amazon women and to El Dorado), dialogues of the dead (all the principle characters are dead), the tragicomic double (Aguirre and his daimón), the juxtaposition of historical characters from different periods in history, the bringing together of “high” and “low” cultural elements, and the insertion of different genres (the insertion of texts from the Crónicas de Omagua y El Dorado).

^[4]There are six known sixteenth-century chronicles of Pedro de Orsúa’s ill-fated El Dorado expedition. See Elena Mampel and Neus Escandall Tur, Lope de Aguirre: Crónicas 1559–61 (Barcelona: Editorial 7 1/2, 1981).

^[5]White has adapted this terminology from Stephen C. Pepper’s World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley: U of California P, 1966).

^[6]“The Organicist attempts to depict the particulars discerned in the historical field as components of synthetic process. At the heart of the Organicist strategy is a metaphysical commitment to the paradigm of the microcosmic-macrocosmic relationship; and the Organicist historian will tend to be governed by the desire to see individual entities as components of processes which aggregate into wholes that are greater than, or qualitatively different from, the sum of their parts” (White 15).

^[7]“The Mechanistic theory of explanation turns upon the search for casual laws that determine the outcomes of processes discovered in the historical field. The objects that are thought to inhabit the historical field are construed as existing in the modality of part-part relationships, the specific configurations of which are determined by the laws that are presumed to govern their interactions” (White 16–17).

^[8]Eliade writes: “It would certainly be interesting, in any case, to know if the theory according to which everything happens is “good,” simply because it has happened, would have been accepted without qualms by the thinkers of the Balkans, or of colonial territories” (152). Eliade reminds us that the typical individual subject does not actively participate in the “creation” of history and that, except for an infinitesimal minority of humanity, the so-called freedom to “make” history is illusory. Daimón echoes this idea and is also a parody of the “Great Man” theory of history.

^[9]By their very nature all narratives have a telos. All come to a certain end and are determined in a more or less authoritarian manner. The difference is that a Contextualist narrative has boundaries that are relatively (and usually highly) circumscribed; emphasizing their contingency and confining themselves to a particular situation. One could say that Contextualist narratives present a “microtelos” as opposed to the “macrotelos” of Organicist and Mechanist historiography.

^[10]Corina S. Mathieu offers another explanation of the Eternal Return in Daimón: “Y una vez más se hace realidad la teoría del eterno retorno cuando Aguirre comprueba en pleno siglo XX que ‘la vieja alianza, la antigua compinchería’ entre la Fuerzas Armadas y la iglesia se ha dado nuevamente para oprimir al pueblo en nombre de una vacía retórica ética, referencia obvia a los gobiernos militares de los setenta en la Argentina” (517). Following Elzbieta Sklodowska’s observation with regard to one of Posse’s other, better known, historical novels, Los perros del paraíso, Aguirre’s resumption of the conquest and rebellion against the Spanish crown echoes the Marxian notion of the historical figure, tragic in her own time, who becomes farcical when she returns and attempts to “repeat” the past in the face of changing historical conditions. Sklodowska adds: “La repetición de la historia en el espacio de la escritura es, pues, inexorablemente paródica” (351).

^[11]Posse’s use of the Eternal Return of his hapless Aguirre is clearly a parody of Nietzsche’s “Will it if you can will to live it eternally.” Daimón’s protagonist is quite the opposite of the “joy-bringing,” “life-affirming” Übermensch.Daimón’s Aguirre is not the vehicle of a joy that wants eternity but rather of a misery that longs for universal company. The novel’s other connection with Nietzsche’s thought is its parody of “uncritical” monumental or antiquarian approaches to history that Nietzsche critiques in his The Use and Abuse of History.

^[12]Bakhtin writes: “As tragedy and epic enclose, Menippean forms open up, anatomize. The serious forms comprehend man; the Menippean forms are based on man’s inability to know and contain his fate” (106–07).

^[13]In her introduction to Blanchot’s The Step Not Beyond, Lycette Nelson states that “Writing responds to the demand of the return because, as Blanchot has insisted throughout his theoretical work, writing never begins, but is always beginning again. The time of the Eternal Return is the time of writing, which will be read in the future and will have been written in the past” (xiii–ix).

^[14]Daniel Balderston makes the following connection between Borges and the Latin American historical novel of the second half of the twentieth century: “The new historical novel in Latin America owes much to Pierre Menard, for whom historical truth ‘no es lo que sucedió; es lo que juzgamos que sucedió’” (11).